Amasia
Highland village above the Akhuryan

What is this place

Amasia is a mountain village in north-western Shirak, spread along the right bank of the Akhuryan River at around 1,870 metres. Travellers come for the quiet of the highlands, the cool air and the wide views on the road to Lake Arpi.

Amasia sits close to Armenia's border, in the rolling north-west of Shirak province. The village stands high — nearly 1,870 metres above sea level — and the climate is genuinely alpine, with long, frosty winters and short, cool summers. The Akhuryan River, along whose right bank the village stretches, has carved a scenic gorge nearby; it is for those views that travellers heading to Lake Arpi turn off here.

The place has deep roots. In antiquity these lands belonged to the canton of Ashotsk in the province of Gugark, and today's population formed from Armenians who resettled here from 1829 onward, coming from Kars, Basen and Western Armenia. In the Soviet era Amasia was the seat of its own district, and from 1951 to 1956 it bore the name Ghukasyan. Today it is the centre of an enlarged community that brings together more than two dozen surrounding villages.

Traces of antiquity are scattered around the village: about two kilometres to the north-west stand the ruins of a Cyclopean fortress that locals call Chatin Dara, while the nearby hills hold medieval Armenian chapels and old gravestones. In the village itself, visitors find brightly painted wooden houses and a wool workshop opened in 2019, where yarn spun from Shirak wool is dyed with natural pigments. Around sixteen hundred residents still keep livestock and graze their flocks on the high meadows here.

Amasia makes a handy stop on the way north from Gyumri — about 24 kilometres from the regional capital. An hour or two is enough to walk the village, look down into the Akhuryan gorge and take in the unhurried rhythm of the Armenian highlands.